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XFinity Booming: NX or 10x?




Ignore that Theranos image. 

Today's subject is a series of television ads promoting Xfinity's wifi capability that uses "boomtown" as a theme.  Wifi is "booming," we are told.  

I am amused by the use of stereotypical examples of other historic booms.

There are gold prospectors (a/k/a the '49ers), -- oil barons (suggestive of the source of Clampett family wealth that fueled its collective relocation to LA) and "tech founders" (a contemporary plague, though these boomtown tech founders have a dotcom/ '90s look).

The company offering us these vignettes, XFinity, is suggesting that the new gold is wifi, and that they have staked their claim.

AdWeek did a sympathetic writeup of the "Boomtown" ads. 

As to the "tech founders" portrayed in the ad, there is a bit of dialog that is deliberately obscure.  Two stereotypical Silicon Valley types are in the same room, a man and a woman.  He asks her a question and she answers with what sounds like "NX double unicorn IPO", although her phrase might also be taken as "ten x double unicorn" as in "ten times...." 

I have to prefer NX. After all, why say "Ten x double" rather than just saying "twenty x"? Anyway: in techie jargon NX means "no execution."  It refers to a type of data (or a "bit") that helps protect devices from software viruses. Presumably the two "tech founders" would know the term.

A bit more vocabulary (see what I did there?) ... an IPO is an initial public offering, when a previously private company gets a listing on an exchange, which during boom times on the stock market often produces a bonanza for the founders/pre-IPO owners, who are selling into the excited market. A "unicorn" is a private firm with a valuation at or exceeding $1 billion.  So the two characters are celebrating their interest in a $2 billion entity that sells security from malicious software.

I'm not going anywhere with this, but it took me some time and mental effort to puzzle out what she was saying so I thought I'd share it....  




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